Damage overtime (poison, burn, etc). Opinion? How do you use it in your game? Do you even use it?

This happens in the game I'm currently playing. However, it applies not in DoT type of debuff. But a strong one like paralysis. Which is funny, because they build but resistance fast after the debuff successfully land. So applying second debuff will be hard. How much "imba" the DoT you are purposing in this matter though. Scaled with how high boss HP? Or the actor stats?

Interesting. I assume the poison one is designed based on Darkest Dungeon? Because I had a thought myself of activating DoTs at the beginning of the turn instead of supposed to be at the end of turn.

Do you make corruption as ultimate skill? Because DoT scaled based on HP is arguably overpower at some point

@TheoAllen

Activating at the start of the turn is something I really liked from Darkest Dungeon, but my main reasoning for Poison activating at the start of the turn is because its weaker then Burn. So it can hit with its lower damage at the start of the turn and deal its damage, maybe killing them. Burn on the other hand activates after they've acted, so they still healed their allies or did the damage to you before taking the damage and possibly dying. Corruption is tied to the "Ultimate" Skill of one of the characters, and she's the only party member who can use it. Requires all of her TP, does damage to all enemies and inflicts with them with Corruption. It does 10% a turn to normal enemies, and only 5% a turn to bosses, but while it remains on the enemies for the full battle, it falls off bosses after 3 turns, and they develop a resistance to it. The real benefit to Corruption for the character, -if- I can get it working how I want, is each turn she has Corruption out, she gets stronger. So strong normal enemies, ala Behemoth Kings from Final Fantasy, she would make a lot easier to deal with, and she essentially gives herself a 3 turn Steroid for boss fights.

I have a fair few DoT effects in my project, but the general guidelines I use are as follows:

1) Status effects always stick unless the target is outright immune. Partial resistance or sub-100% chances of success are rare. (Usually when some direct-damage spell has a chance of inflicting a status effect as a side effect.)
2) DoTs usually have side effects.
3) DoTs bypass defense/armor/MDF, but may inflict elemental damage.
4) Skills that inflict a status ailment as their sole effect are typically very cheap, instant-cast or are on characters that aren't likely to have something better to do with their turn (like healers), or are counterattacks.
5) As a corollary to #4, most skills that inflict status ailments do something else, too, typically direct damage. They may well do a lot less direct damage than effects that do only damage, or they may be more resource-intensive (but more efficient overall).

On #2, each damage-over-time effect has some kind of schtick (players of Guild Wars 2 may find these conditions somewhat familiar).
Bleeding deals non-elemental damage each turn, it can stack up to 10 times.
Torment deals earth-elemental damage each turn, stacks up to 10 times, deals double damage if the target has spent Vigor that turn, and can crit each time it ticks. (This tends to represent either crush/tear injuries or magically-exacerbated pain that gets worse if you move.)
Poison deals poison-elemental damage each turn and reduces incoming healing by 50%. It does not stack but does more damage than a single stack of Bleeding or Torment.
Engulf (burning) deals 5% of the target's max HP each turn as fire-elemental damage, stacks up to 10 times, and, each time it ticks, each stack inflicts another stack of Engulfed (which does not tick until the next turn).
Ickage inflicts 20% of the target's max HP as poison-elemental damage and adds a random condition that the target doesn't already have, but has a LUK-based chance to fall off each turn; it's very rare in the player's hands and the few skills that cause it are very potent.

All of these except Engulf and Ickage do damage based on the inflicter's stats (MAT or ATK usually, but odd skills can scale off odd stats. I'd rather have something like GW2's Condition Damage stat, but RMMV doesn't exactly make it easy to glue something like that on). Poison, Ickage and Torment on players persist after battle, but only one stack and only cause damage - no side effects outside combat. Bleeding, as the one with no real side effect, makes up for it by being fairly common (often as a side effect of physical attack skills) and being non-elemental (which is both good and bad; never resisted, but also never exploits a weakness). DoT effects except Engulf and Ickage have a fixed duration when applied, though that duration can vary based on the user or target's stats. Engulf and Ickage last until the target dies or until they're cured (but Ickage can randomly end early based on the target's LUK).

Ickage and Engulf are partial exceptions to #1 - Engulf is usually applied as a side effect of fire-elemental attacks, with a percent chance. Ickage doesn't always stick to players, but because it's nasty, enemies that can cause it are a serious threat.

Connected to all of this, related to my #5, most elements have a schtick too -
Fire skills are expensive and tend to do moderate damage but usually have a chance to Engulf.
Ice skills can cause Slow. (Or sometimes Freeze, but that's a really nasty one too, so usually relegated to status-only spells.)
Thunder skills can always crit but don't have side effects.
Earth skills usually Daze, Stun or Bleed.
Poison skills usually do low damage but always inflict Poison.
Light and Shadow skills are rarely resisted and uncommon.

In most cases, I find it pretty useless.

In general, any options that traded time in exchange for damage in RPGs tended to be pretty useless with the notable exceptions of summons in various Final fantasies. In my experience, it had to be a very large damage increase to be worth it (say Bahamut in FFX).

But then again I play mostly FFs where all DoT are pretty useless against bosses.

As always, this is simply something that comes down to our ability as designers. It's up to you to structure your game to keep an ability relevant. There's a lot of great suggestions here to do that.

But ultimately a single gimmick won't do it. Good game design would keep a strategy like poisoning the enemy relevant for a lot of the game.
Adding it as an on hit effect to other abilities can do that.
But ultimately designing a stage to keep an ability relevant is our jobs as designers. Making sure the player is given opportunity to use the abilities presented and feel like it was an impacted choice.
Use context clues that illustrate when poison might be the optimal strategy.
In the case of multiple strategies, always balance to account for strategy combinations and see how many encourage poisoning the enemy on top of other skills.

There's a couple dozen ways to add relevance to DoTs. But ultimately they'll all fall flat if you do not design the game to keep them relevant. That goes beyond just the skill, but the enemies, the mechanics, even the design of the levels.

I spoke a bit earlier about battle system setups where DoTs are best implemented, but reading through the thread again, I want to add something else about my thoughts on making DoTs relevant in any setup.

I feel the whole idea of "DoTs are either godlike or useless" is a strawman. Granted, it's one of the most reasonable strawmen ever because a ton of JRPGs make their status effects exactly that (godlike or useless)... but there's absolutely no reason it has to be that way, and if you look hard enough you can find examples of DoTs done well (especially in MMOs).

Best case scenario: your status effects (including DoTs) work against all enemies, but are less effective against bosses and other foes where inflicting the status would break the challenge of the battle. In a game I'm designing now ("How Badly"), the AURa stat determines the power and length of incoming states (increases the power and length for charms, reduces them for hexes). Boss-level monsters tend to have high AUR, just like all their other stats tend to be higher. You can still inflict Burning or Poison on them like you can against any other foe. But it's going to be a weaker, shorter form of the state if they have high AUR. Some bosses have higher DEF and lower AUR, and those might be ideal targets for a DoT attack - but here it's a difference by degrees, instead of a frustrating all-or-nothing proposition.

Similarly, the original Guild Wars let you apply (nearly) any status effect to any boss, and simply gave all bosses a trait where the length of hexes was halved on them. And, of course, they made DoTs drain absolute amounts of HP over time, rather than a percentage of Max HP. This is usually good design when you want to make your DoTs good against both weak monsters and huge bosses. That kind of chip damage will be significant against both weak monsters (where a small amount of HP looms larger, even though it will only trigger once or twice before you kill it anyway) and huge bosses (where the damage will eventually add up over time).

Percentage-based DoTs have their place, but if you want to use them, you may need to adjust your approach to avoid the feast-or-famine design screw. There are at least two ways to do this:

• Adjust the way you design enemies and troops, so that the power gap between ordinary enemies and bosses is much smaller, and also so that bosses tend to be harder hitters rather than giant damage sponges. Now the DoT doesn't need to be overpowered, and it can be useful against everyone!
• Aim to make the DoT merely "good" against one class of foe, and - yes - useless against the others. If the DoT deals 2% Max HP damage against a foe for 3 turns, that's quite good (but not gamebreaking) against a boss, arguably feasible against a single tough enemy, and useless against a single weak foe in a large group. That's fine! This character is more useful against bosses than mobs, just like AoE mages tend to be more useful against mobs than bosses. You can allow this effect to apply reliably without worrying about breaking the game's balance. As an additional tip, you might attach it as an additional effect to a standard damage spell, so as to make the skill at least somewhat useful in all situations.

With all of that said, even though you want to make the balance of DoTs versus Direct Damage fairly comparable, don't forget that it's important to make them different in the opportunities they present! If they essentially do the exact same thing, you no longer have an interesting decision. I talked about this in a recent thread about the difference between the two.

In summary, here's how to avoid design issues with DoTs:

1. Allow DoTs (and other status effects) to reliably apply; don't give bosses immunity to them
2. Utility Scaling is a good thing for DoTs!
3. Use a limited number of turns/time for DoTs (especially against super-tough foes)
4. Make DoTs do absolute damage, not damage relative to Max HP
5. Any of the above points can be ignored, but will require careful reconsideration of troop/enemy design to accommodate the change

I plan on using it in my own game as more of a pressure mechanic, and less of a means to deal damage. So when enemies use DoT on the player, the player must make a decision on whether to ignore the DoT and heal after battle, or to spend a turn in battle to heal.

The same goes for the players when facing a boss. The players using a DoT against a boss is not so much to kill with the affliction, but rather to get the boss to spend a turn either healing HP, removing the DoT, or to keep DPS up when player has to spend turns healing the characters.

One thing that always bothered my in older games was getting to a point in harder boss fights in which you get stuck playing defensive for long periods of time. Being able to use a DoT in those cases, just to keep pressure on the boss while I'm playing defense, would have worked wonders for my frustration tolerance.

I struggled for the longest time with my Poison and Bleed states trying to get them to seem somewhat balanced and fair (not to mention different from each other since Bleed was just basically a renamed Poison). I didn't like the default %MHP mechanic because it was so absolute and ended up either overpowered or useless for both players and the enemies. I tried using static numbers like -10hp per turn but even that seemed to quickly become ineffective at higher levels and made them almost pointless to use on enemies.

After a ton of math, spreadsheets, and stat juggling I finally landed on this compromise:

Poison:
Poison eats 10% of your current HP every turn. What this translates to in testing (so far) is a DOT that does decent damage to characters with high HP, quickly bringing them down to lower HP levels but is unlikely to kill you outright. Poison won't be bringing the party to 0 HP (at least not very quickly) but instead it works to keep them down to a lower HP level so enemies can have a chance to finish them off.

Bleed:
For Bleed I flipped the idea on its head. Instead of losing 10% of your current HP every turn you lose 10% of your missing HP every turn. What this ends up doing is making Bleed not very dangerous at higher HP levels but the closer a character gets to death the more deadly Bleed becomes. I think this creates some very interesting scenarios where at high to max HP you can choose to ignore the small damage from Bleed but you might pay for it later once you get to low HP levels.

Each of these states are finite but long winded and last even after battle. Not dealing with them is very possible but not without consequences. The percentages keep them relevant regardless of HP totals while the %Current mechanic keeps their power in check. I'm contemplating either increasing the percentages a tad or maybe making some stronger "levels" of each but I'm pretty happy with their performance currently, in the early game at least.

Would you mind showing me how you did this? Im working with alot of poisons and i would appreciate an experts help lol. Making poisons MAT instead of a % is hard as f for me lol.

I did it with Yanfly's Lunatic States Scripts, then use the MAT Slip code they provide to make it DOT based on MAT.

Hopefully that helps get you started. I'm really tired and off to bed so can't state more right now, but if you need more can you post a thread in RGSSx Script requests and I or someone else can show you more tomorrow? Plus this way we keep this thread on topic too.